Sports Writer

WOMEN will race a Tour Down Under next year provided a push to diversify Australia's premier cycling event by the Union Cycliste Internationale's newest boss succeeds.

And women could also be invited to compete at Australia's second-biggest stage race, the Jayco Herald Sun Tour, if Tracey Gaudry, the new president of the UCI's Oceania confederation, can convince organisers of the benefits.

The Tour Down Under, which finished in Adelaide on Sunday, and the 61-year-old Herald Sun Tour, have always been exclusively male events.

Set to attend her first UCI management committee meeting in the US on Friday at a critical time in the sport's history, Gaudry has women's racing high on her agenda.

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A female criterium series, managed by Cycling South Australia, has run concurrently with Tour Down Under for years but Gaudry is adamant a women's stage race should, and can, be incorporated in the tour.

Australia's only professional women's road team, Orica-AIS - the female arm of the GreenEDGE team - bypassed this year's three-day women's event in Adelaide, which only underlined the event's shortcomings.

''That highlighted the disconnect, and we don't want to see that,'' Gaudry told Fairfax Media. ''We want to see a celebration of cycling.''

In recent days, Gaudry met South Australia's Premier Jay Weatherill, and other key stakeholders in the Tour Down Under, which is owned by the South Australian government.

''I'm sensing a great willingness,'' Gaudry said on Sunday. ''And I think it's entirely possible.''

On the politically sensitive matter that Lance Armstrong was paid as much as $9 million to ride Tour Down Under between 2009-11, Gaudry said the party most at fault was actually the UCI.

Armstrong won special permission to come out of retirement in Adelaide in 2009 after the sport's international governing body waived anti-doping rules that state riders must give six months' notice before returning to elite competition.

''It's quite clear that a flaw in the process was the granting of his licence to race within the six-month period of registering to return to competition,'' Gaudry said.

''The rules were relaxed. And would they have been relaxed for somebody else? Probably not.''

While Armstrong has insisted he was clean when he came back, US Anti-Doping Agency boss Travis Tygart says the disgraced rider is now telling fresh lies.

The South Australian government has never disclosed how much it paid Armstrong, though it has admitted in light of the American's lifetime ban for doping that it has no legal recourse to recoup the millions it paid him.

Anti-doping expert Michael Ashenden has said the race ''prostituted itself'' by engaging Armstrong when there was ''plentiful'' evidence around in 2009 that he was a doper. Ashenden said the race, and the government, should have at least indemnified themselves in dealing with Armstrong and that both parties failed to carry out due diligence.

Tour Down Under's race director, Mike Turtur, rebuffed those claims last week - and also denied it was wrong that the rules were bent for Armstrong in 2009. The Premier's office would not comment.